A Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-led Vaccine Commission Would Be Bad News

(WIRED) – THE INCOMING PRESIDENTIAL administration’s war against evidence-based policy-making has opened a new front. President-elect Donald Trump announced—or seemed to announce, anyway—that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., nephew of a former president and an outspoken vaccine conspiracy theorist, would head up a panel on the safety and scientific integrity of vaccines. If it happens, it could severely damage US public health. By Megan Molteni

For more than a decade, Kennedy has written and given speeches on what he says is a link between immunizations and autism—primarily based on a widely debunked and retracted study—and criss-crossed the country to testify against state vaccine mandates in places like California and Vermont. To be clear, there is broad scientific consensus on the safety and necessity of a national vaccine program.

Kennedy once said, “They can put anything they want in that vaccine and they have no accountability for it.” That, of course, is totally false. In addition to the years-long clinical trial process that any new vaccine has to go through to get approval from the FDA, numerous other safeguards make sure vaccines are safe. The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a panel of doctors and researchers, make recommendations for the US childhood immunization schedule. All their meetings are open to the public and available online via webcast. The National Vaccine Advisory Committee, a longstanding group of officials from the Department of Health and Human Services and national authorities in vaccine science work to keep vaccine supplies adequate and safe while reducing the number of adverse reactions. And if something does go wrong, you can file a claim for vaccine-related losses with the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a special, no-fault court.

So what will Kennedy’s new commission do, exactly? Trump’s transition team hasn’t supplied any details, but Kennedy did tell reporters in the lobby of Trump Tower that “we ought to be reading the science, and we ought to be debating the science.”

The Trump team almost immediately questioned the whole premise of the bit, or seemed to, saying (via a spokesperson, via Twitter) that “The President-elect is exploring the possibility of forming a committee on Autism, which affects so many families; however no decisions have been made at this time.” So maybe a commission won’t happen at all. Or it’ll be about autism and not vaccines? Hard to tell.

It’s similarly hard to figure out where such a commission would sit in the framework of the federal government. It couldn’t, for example, tell your school district to ease up on vaccination requirements for your kids, because that’s matter of state law, not federal. It likewise couldn’t make changes to the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, the law that created the compensation program. Kennedy has repeatedly tried to repeal or reform the legislation, which protects the liability of vaccine manufacturers in an attempt to maintain a stable national supply. But only Congress could do that—Constitution, etc.

But a commission could impact national vaccination policy in other, subtler ways. It could influence the Trump Administration and likely HHS Secretary Tom Price to appoint anti-vaxxers to spots on the national advisory committees. Price could also narrow the list of vaccines the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act covers, opening up more companies to legal action. A commission could also sway the Department of Justice to alter its stance on litigating vaccine claims in favor of patients looking to establish a link between vaccines and autism. Or it could try to convince Congress to stop funding the Vaccines For Children program, which covers immunization for millions of low-income kids each year.

It this is what happens, it’d be a public health disaster. “When you have the highest office in the nation giving a platform to a champion of an unscientific, unproven theory, that could create a crisis in public confidence that would place the health of America’s children in serious danger,” says Jason L. Schwartz, a Professor at the Yale School of Public Health who has studied vaccination for more than a decade. The commission may never have to do anything. Its very existence threatens to unravel a century of public health successes.